


Tapestry

by amaradangeli



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Episode: s01e06 The First Commandment, Friendship, Gen, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Vignette, discussion of Sam/Jonas Hanson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 00:57:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21467410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaradangeli/pseuds/amaradangeli
Summary: “So, what I don’t understand is... why Hanson?”
Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Carter & Daniel Jackson
Comments: 38
Kudos: 107





	Tapestry

“So, what I don’t understand is... why  _ Hanson _ ?”

Sam didn’t generally like having personal, philosophical conversations in sports bars on team nights with half-drunk teammates who maintained generally optimistic outlooks about people in relationships, and she knew she wasn’t going to enjoy one with tipsy Daniel in O’Malley’s during what was supposed to be a celebratory sort of dinner and beer thing after a supremely shitty mission.

There was potential with these people – her teammates – to have  camaraderie . But the only real potential friend among them, as best as she could imagine, was Daniel. How she answered this question would lay that groundwork.

“Have you ever done something just because it was the wrong thing to do?” She couldn’t look at him while she asked. Instead, she stared at the cherry pinned to the bottom of his glass of cola by an ice-cube. He’d been alternating between soda and beer and was still half gone, she thought with a wry smile.

He considered the question very seriously, in the that way only drunks and the very empathetic have, then shook his head. “No. Never.”

She wasn’t surprised. “Well,” she shrugged one shoulder and pulled a tiny piece of pineapple out of her cocktail by squishing it against the glass with the tip of her index finger, “I have.”

“He was a wrong thing to do?”

Her laugh sounded raw, hoarse, and embittered enough that he lost the half-dopey expression that usually accompanied his attempts to get to know her better. She didn’t really want to discourage his tentative acts of friendship, but she also didn’t know quite how to temper her feelings about her relationship with Jonas – not any more than she already had with the colonel while on the mission.

Daniel, skilled at all kinds of communication, didn’t require a verbal answer. He just moved on. “Why’d you do it, then?”

The answer was 7 years long – the time between her mother’s death and the night she met Jonas – and filled with countless tests of all the remaining authority figures in her life. Chief among them, quite naturally, her father. The easier answer was the one she gave Daniel. “He was charming. And handsome. And,” she drained her glass, “very good with his hands.”

Daniel looked adorably confused for a moment, and then his eyes widened with the dawn of understanding. His eyes darted around for a moment, clearly not wanting to land on her right away and he found the colonel and  Teal’c discussing the intricacies of darts.  Teal’c , much to Sam’s amusement, was exceptionally bad at  pool .

“Okay, well,” Daniel’s voice had taken on a teasing edge by the time he would meet her eye again, “good sex aside, what was the attraction? You were going to marry him,” he reminded her unnecessarily. 

The sex was great, she mentally corrected him. But she wasn’t going to get into the details of how Jonas had appealed to the parts of herself that she’d only ever hinted at with her bad behavior, the parts that made her relish the way he got forceful with her, and demanding. The way a therapist later pointed out her father hadn’t - choosing to be, instead, mostly disappointed with her choices. Her dad hadn’t been equipped to parent her, she discovered later, and as she grew into adulthood, he’d transitioned to the more practiced and comfortable role of her superior officer with opinion privileges. It pissed her off no end that the daddy issues Jonas had always accused her of having turned out to be some of her more serious baggage. What a cliché.

The thing was that, while she didn’t regret not marrying Jonas, she still had to admit that she’d been more able to be herself with him – in the beginning, anyway – than she had ever been able to with anyone else. The other, less-serious boyfriends she had before and after, were always the recipient of the  version of herself she present to the general public. Smart, sweet, maybe only mildly sarcastic, and too willing to compromise her own comfort for the sake of someone else’s convenience. 

She’d called it having a soft spot for the lunatic fringe. But really it was more of a sense of familiarity. Whole people, she’d decided were very much like puzzle pieces – able to fit with many, but most closely and perfectly with few. Fringe, by comparison, didn’t have to fit anybody and no one expected it to be anything more than vaguely presentable. And everything fit out there on the edges – with enough maneuvering. 

Daniel nudged her foot under the table and she realized she’d been lost in thought too long. The corner of his mouth quirked up when she focused back on his face. “Welcome back.”

She didn’t care to lay all of that on the table in front of him, even in the name of their burgeoning friendship. But she also didn’t want to shrug the topic off so completely that Daniel found her to be unreceptive. So, she compromised. "For all that he turned out to be a loose  cannon , his life was very structured.”

“That appealed to you?”

“I joined the Air Force, didn’t I?”

“Did it ever bother you? Being smarter than him?”

“Who says I was smarter?”

He scoffed at her. “You’re smarter than everybody.”

“Not you.” Not exactly.

“I’m smarter than everybody, too,” he said with a grin.

She couldn’t help it, she grinned back. The rapid-fire exchange was just the lightness she needed to break out of the Jonas-headspace that always left her feeling both like she managed to escape, just in the nick of time, the only man who would ever make her feel the way he had. Things with him were bad for a long time and very bad at the end. But she could admit she’d never felt more desired than she had with him. Or understood.

But she got the feeling that these people – this brand-new team that she was still getting to know – that maybe they understood her. Or had the capacity to. She might not ever feel complete freedom to be all of herself – she probably couldn’t, given that one of the team members was a superior officer – but she could, perhaps, be a close-enough approximating to fill the void inside her that never quite seemed filled in the absence of the dramatic, intense relationship with Jonas. As Daniel had put it, _ good sex aside _ , the thing that really attracted her to Jonas was the sense of belonging. 

She’d searched for it since the tapestry of her family had unraveled. With SG-1, she finally felt like edges were pulling back together.

Three bottles of beer and a green bottle of sparkling water clunked down on the table and she looked away from Daniel with surprise. The colonel slouched into one of the chairs as  Teal’c settled gracefully into the other. How a man with that kind of bulk did anything gracefully, Sam would never know.

“What’d we miss?” Colonel O’Neill twisted the cap off one of the bottles before sliding it to Daniel, another cap, a bottle in front of her, the crunching sound of the aluminum cap seal breaking on the water bottle, slid in front of Teal’c, and finally a bottle opened and raised to his mouth. The air charged and Sam knew, with the intellect born of having a brother, that she was about to be embarrassed.

“Sam here was just telling me how good Captain Hanson was with his hands.”

She groaned. As her head dropped to the  table she saw the surprised look on the colonel’s face and a slight lifting of the corner of his mouth. 

“Well, don’t let us stop you.”

She huffed against the polished wood, her hot breath smelling sweet like the amaretto she’d been drinking.

“Good in what way?”  Teal’c asked.

As Daniel and the colonel cracked up, she couldn’t help but do the same. She’d sacrificed more dignity for less reward than weaving herself into the fabric of SG-1. She snagged her beer on her way up and back to slouch in her chair similarly to the way the colonel did. She pointed the mouth of the bottle at Daniel. “Your days are numbered, Jackson.”

The grin he gave her reminded her that he was past half drunk. She rolled her eyes and glanced at the colonel to find his sparkling with amusement. She snagged a cap off the table and flicked it at him. He caught it against his chest and popped it back at her. It pinged off her bottle and into Daniel’s soda. 

He peered into the glass. “Hey, I hadn’t finished that!”

She watched, amused, as Daniel and the colonel argued good-naturedly over the safety of the maraschino cherry at the bottom of his glass and felt the tight bands around her chest – the ones she’d felt for more than a decade – ease just a little. 

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah, I generally don't write gen fic. But I've had a couple of stories sitting around on my hard drive for a while that were more Sam- or Jack-centric without any ship. And I've resisted finishing or sharing them because I always sort of thought that my audience liked my shippy stuff because they liked the smut I wrote. But then I realized that it's been a long time since I've really written smut. And that people were still reading. So maybe they'd like some of the character stuff I've been kicking around, too. This wasn't one of the things that has been sitting around. I just picked up First Commandment in my rewatch today because that's where I left off so long ago and because I've been mainlining stargate fic all weekend and I wanted to see the characters in action. Then this happened.


End file.
